


Stars Burn Out

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [7]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, It's really hard to tag this without spoiling anything so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-09 14:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11106234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: Nyma never claimed to be a hero.SPOILERS for Voltron: Duality, Someplace Like Home chapter 24.





	1. Born to Fly

**Author's Note:**

> One more time:
> 
> SPOILERS!!!!
> 
> No, seriously, this (a) won't make a whole lot of sense if you aren't up to date on the rest of the series and (b) the third paragraph contains a major spoiler for chapter 24 of "Someplace Like Home." So if you haven't read the chapter titled "Before the Storm," stop right now and go do that.
> 
> ...
> 
> Good?
> 
> Cool. This fic contains references to prior torture (no graphic details) and discussion of/reaction to assumed (off-screen) character death. But if you're caught up on Duality, you probably already knew that. This chapter references sexual harrassment a few times but doesn't go into much detail. Also some alcohol use in chapter 4.

Nyma’s hands were shaking as she guided the _Harbinger_ out of the hangar. “Guided.” Ha. More like opened the thrusters to full and tried not to tear herself apart on the walls as she floundered toward open space. Tears blurred her vision.

She kept expecting Rolo to chime in with a string of colorful curses as he held on for dear life. (He’d always accused her of being a terrible pilot, but when they found themselves in a pinch, he always relinquished the controls to her. “I’m the better shot,” he’d once said, and then proceeded to miss every ship on their tail.)

But Rolo wasn’t here. He was back there, on the prison ship, bleeding, _dying_ , and the hook of him held fast in Nyma’s chest, clawing at her as the distance between them stretched. Every horrific thing the Empire had ever done flashed through Nyma’s mind, every story Rolo had told halfway before the darkness of his past gagged him, every moment they’d stared down their own death and escaped by the skin of their teeth.

The best she could hope for was for that last barrage to have killed him. Better that than interrogation, humiliation, and a public execution.

The wing clipped the edge of the bay doors, jostling the entire ship, and Nyma swore as she wrestled for control. A digital whistle echoed in her ears, and it took her too long to realize that was just a memory, too. Beezer was down in the hold, a hole burned through his power cell.

Nyma was on her own.

No, that was being too generous. Nyma had a busted cyber-unit, nineteen scared and hungry ex-prisoners, an army out for blood on her tail, and no clue what she was going to do to get them all out of here alive.

Well, that was step one, wasn’t it? Get them out.

A few overachievers managed to launch fighters close behind the _Harbinger_ , and one or two of the warship’s main turrets were waking up. Nyma knew it was only going to get worse the longer she stuck around, so—still gripping the yoke hard enough that her nails dug into her palm—she leaned over to Rolo’s station and smacked the wormhole instigator.

A shimmering blue portal just big enough for the _Harbinger_ appeared before her, locked onto whatever coordinates were at the top of the list. Voices of dead friends rattled off all the ways she was going to get herself killed wormholing into an unknown with the enemy so close on her tail.

She didn’t care. They’d tried to play it safe (well, safe-ish), and look how that had ended up.

 _I’m so sorry, Rolo,_ she thought, then took them into the wormhole.

* * *

Nyma wasn’t born to revolution. Few people were; fighting back against the Galra Empire left more people dead than raising a family.

So, no. Nyma didn’t grow up itching to join the fight, watching her family make heroes of themselves in the name of a noble cause. She grew up on a Galra-controled world called Ryloss, stocking shelves in her family’s store by day and running around town by night with some of the more daring kids, throwing herself into their games to prove she wasn’t a baby.

Business was slow more often than not, her bedroom ceiling had a persistent drip that lulled her to sleep each night, and everyone knew to keep their heads down when the Galra came for their annual audits. The most rebellion she’d ever seen in her own family was when her mother had shown the auditors fraudulent books so they saved a thousand GAC on taxes.

Nyma wasn’t born to rebel, but she sometimes thought she'd been born to fly.

* * *

Nyma wasn’t sure how long she kept it up. Two wormholes became four, became eight, and then the wormholer broke down. Nyma was shaking as she crawled back into the maintenance space. Her vision was blurred with tears, and she couldn’t seem to get the socket wrench to grip the bolt holding down the panel she needed to move.

“Gods vrekking _dammit_!” she roared after her eighth failed attempt. The wrench flew from her hand and struck the engine casing with a loud _clang_ , but Nyma couldn’t bring herself to care about the noise, or about the new dent in the metal. Rolo was gone, Beezer was _gone_ , the _Harbinger_ was falling apart, and so was she.

She wanted nothing more than to curl up and sob until the Galra caught up to her and put an end to her misery—but somehow she’d made herself responsible for a dozen and a half other lives.

_Pull yourself together, Nyma._

Groaning, she turned and went to find her discarded wrench. It had landed near the hatch to the crew quarters. Nyma bent to retrieve it, every bone in her body protesting the motion, and when she straightened there was someone looking back at her through the opening. Nyma stiffened, blinking her last few stubborn tears away, and wrinkled her nose.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping or something?”

The girl—woman?— _human—_ crossed her arms. “Not tired.” They stared at each other for a long moment, Nyma raising an eyebrow, before the human leaned her arms on the hatch. It sat at waist height from that side, though in the maintenance space it was flush with the catwalk. “So do aliens not need to rest or something?”

Nyma scowled. “What are you, stupid? Of course we need to rest.”

The human appeared unruffled by Nyma’s sharp words, merely nodding in response. “Mmkay, uh-huh. Right. I was just wondering. We’ve been going for...a while. I figured you would’ve at least had to stretch your legs by now.”

“Do you need something?” Nyma cut in. She knew she sounded snappish. She knew it wasn’t fair. She kept waiting for Rolo to reel her in. “Because if not, I don’t know why you’re bothering me.”

Darkness drifted across the human’s face, but rather than snap back, she just raised her hands and stepped away from the hatch. “Fine. Far be it from me to make sure you’re doing okay.”

She turned to go, and suddenly Nyma was seized with the urge to pick a fight. She was tired, she was emotional, and _vrekking skiv_ she needed to yell. Wriggling out of the engine chamber, Nyma tossed her wrench aside and stalked after the human.

“I don’t need your pity.”

The woman spun, her matted hair stirring half-heartedly with the motion. “Pity? For Christ’s sake! You just _saved_ me. I’m trying to show my gratitude. I’m _trying_ to see if you’re okay after—after—”

_Rolo, framed by a sea of sentries. He smiled as they took him._

Nyma’s lungs seized up. “Look here, sweetheart. I don’t know what kind of prissy rescue story you think this is, but we are not friends.”

“I didn’t say we were!”

“Well--” Nyma faltered, her anger a raging flame with nowhere left to spread. “Good,” she finished lamely.

The human pressed shaking hands to her eyes, blowing out a long breath. “Look,” she began, then hesitated. “I’m going to go try to get some sleep. Don’t—don’t push yourself too hard, okay?”

Nyma got the distinct impression none of that was what she’d intended to say, and the way she was so obviously tiptoeing around Nyma doused the last of the anger and left her feeling… numb.

Numb, and tired.

“I won’t,” she said. “You—uh—you found the blankets?”

A wry smile tugged at the human’s mouth. “Yeah. You’ve got quite the collection down there.”

“Tools of the trade,” Nyma said, which only made the other girl raise an eyebrow. But thinking about the odd assortment of weapons, disguises, counterfeit credit chips, and cobbled-together thieving tools reminded Nyma too keenly of Rolo. She turned, pulling down her bunk from where it was secured up and out of the way. “Anyway,” she said. “I’ll come check on you all tomorrow. Goodnight, uh...”

“Val.”

Nyma turned, returning Val’s smile weakly. “I’m Nyma.”

“Goodnight, then, Nyma,” Val said, and closed the door behind her when she left.

* * *

Nyma was sixteen when she left home.

She hadn’t planned to go, but she’d come home on audit day to find her father nursing a broken arm and half the store’s stock shattered on the ground.

 _The Galra found the books,_ her mother said, shaking with fury. _They’ve given us a quarter to pay what we owe in back-taxes._

At first, Nyma had wanted to laugh. Her family did good business, whether or not Ryloss was occupied by the Galra. She wouldn’t go so far as to say they were wealthy, but they were not poor. They ate well, and they paid for the best protection available. They still had to dress in rags, of course, and only the private spaces in the building where they lived and worked were anything approaching respectable—all part of the act.

They had savings, though. Things would be tight for the next little while, but they would be able to pay off the governor—and pay for his _discretion_ , as well.

Except that the auditors had discovered the family’s savings along with the secret records, and had confiscated it to compensate them for the “hassle.” Her family had nothing except a small store and tens of thousands of GAC in damaged wares.

It was Nyma’s fault. Ever since she was twelve and started _growing into herself_ , as the neighbors put it, she’d been her family’s distraction. She’d been born with a sweet face and had cultivated a silver tongue, and if it made her skin crawl when the Galra soldiers ran their claws down her headtails, she could at least take comfort in knowing that they were looking at _her_ and not at her family’s secrets.

In four years, Nyma had turned seduction into an art. It was a fine line she walked—everyone knew the invaders read into anything that might have seemed an invitation, and the word _No_ might not have existed in the Galran language.

Nyma never invited. She never offered, she never hinted. She just smiled, laughed, and let the men go on about themselves. And sometimes, if she could be sure it would never be traced back to her, she found ways to send the soldiers into the path of “accidents” that made sure they never took anything more from her than what she’d already sacrificed.

Lately, though, she’d grown tired of it. She didn’t want to spend her life batting her eyelashes at every Galra to walk through her doors. She wanted to be something more than a pretty shop keeper’s girl with the liquid violet eyes, eyes the color of the Empire, eyes she sometimes wanted to carve out of her head so she didn’t have to hear one more tipsy officer in red and gray tell her she carried a piece of Zarkon in her _pretty fucking face._

More and more, she found excuses to leave the shop. Her friends picked fights with off-duty Galra soldiers and stole from Galra warehouses and vandalized Galra mansions. Her friends talked about buying a ship and leaving this junk heap behind, and Nyma let herself get carried away with that dream.

Every day she told herself that she’d been born to more than this backwater colony. Every night, she looked up at the stars and plotted the course for her life.

She’d been running with her friends the day of the audit. Her parents had been alone in the shop when the Galra came, no pretty face with the Emperor’s eyes to simper and tease until the entourage was too flustered to remember what they’d come for.

If Nyma had been there, the books would have stayed a secret.

If Nyma had been there, her family—her parents, her baby sisters, her grandmother—wouldn’t have been facing a long, slow death in the Galra work camps.

There was little wealth to be made on Ryloss. What her parents had saved up came from years of scrimping and saving and, more recently, doctoring their records to keep back some of the ever-more-crushing taxes the Galra demanded. No legitimate job would pay in a quarter what Nyma’s family needed, and the Galra presence was too strong to allow for a thriving Rylosian black market.

At sixteen years old, with nothing to her name but violet eyes, a practiced smile, and a dream of owning her own ship, Nyma signed on with a band of smugglers who promised her pay enough to meet her family’s debts.

In the ten years since, Nyma had collected enough warrants for her arrest to make landing on Galra-controlled worlds an exercise in self-destruction. She’d heard from her parents, if only rarely. She knew her sisters were grown now, Feila already married, little Shaw following in Nyma’s footsteps and charming every Galra to cross her path. She knew the store had survived, while her grandmother had not. She knew life continued as usual on Ryloss, while Nyma made her way among the stars.

Sometimes, at night, when Rolo was sleeping and Beezer had powered down to charge, Nyma called up the coordinates she still knew by heart and pretended for a few minutes that she would make it home some day.

A silly dream for a silly girl, but at least she’d made another home for herself on the _Harbinger._ At least she had that much, if only for a while.


	2. Across the Sea

Val slept fitfully.

This was nothing new, of course. Her Galra captors had made a game of waking the prisoners up at irregular intervals, leaving them all in a perpetual haze. Whenever she was given a moment alone, she tried for sleep, but her aches kept her up until she was crying into her prison uniform from pure exhaustion.

Even when she _did_ sleep, the nightmares were always there to keep her company.

The ones that featured Lance were the worst, because those were the ones she couldn’t simply brush off when she opened her eyes. She knew Sebastian had not been taken, because none of her family back on Earth knew what she had been up to before she was taken. She knew (now) that Akira had not been found out the same day as Val—not that she’d ever really believed otherwise. Akira would have kicked up every bit as much of a fuss as Val had. Both would have known the other was there from the start, even if they hadn’t been able to talk.

But Lance _had_ been taken. Lance and Hunk and Pidge—they’d disappeared from the Garrison in the dead of night, and as much as Val wished for another answer, she knew he’d almost certainly been swallowed by Project Balmera or sent off to some other Galra prison. Commander Vanda had confirmed as much during one of their early conversations, before the pain.

_He’s Emperor Zarkon’s problem now._

_I can send you to where your cousin is being held._

_Wouldn’t you like to see him again?_

Laying in a nest of oversized coats in the _Harbinger’s_ hangar, Val wondered whether anyone had come along to rescue Lance yet.

She could hear the other refugees moving about, some talking in low voices about food or Earth or who their rescuers were, really. Val allowed herself a few more moments of selfishness before she groaned and sat up. She was tired as hell and sore all over. She desperately wanted a shower, though she doubted all the conditioner in the world could save the matted nest her hair had become. Did they even _have_ conditioner in space?

The thought only reminded her how far she was from home—farther now than before, since the only way to run from their pursuers was _away_. They probably couldn’t go home anyway, not without getting shot out of the sky or bringing destruction down on the planet itself.

So… what, then? Where did they go from here?

 _Voltron,_ Val reminded herself. If she could find Voltron, she could persuade them to come to Earth’s aid. Then, once the Galra were gone, the prisoners could all go home and try to forget any of this had ever happened. Well, all of the prisoners but Val. She still had to find Lance.

It took more effort than it should have to climb out of her tangled blankets and stand, but once she did her stomach growled. The Galra didn’t exactly feed their prisoners three square meals a day, and in all the excitement yesterday no one had spared food a second thought. It had been a few hours of tears, of fear and confusion and hushed reassurances, and then people began to pass out from physical and emotional exhaustion.

Now Val was more focused—focused on finding some form of food for herself and the others—so she headed off toward the small cluster of refugees talking in low voices, pausing on the way to check on one of the more listless girls. The girl managed a shrug and a weak smile when Val asked if she was doing okay, but didn’t respond to any other question. After a few awkward moments, Val sighed, laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder, and moved on.

The word _Galra_ , hissed by someone behind Val, chilled her. She tensed, automatically turning to look for guards, and it took a few moments for her to realize that the refugees—a small cluster that included Yir—were talking about Nyma’s friend. Rolo, Val thought. His name was Rolo.

 _So he_ was _Galra_. She’d wondered, what with that purple skin of his. Some of these people seemed to consider that a reason not to trust him. Or Nyma, for that matter, which was ridiculous. Rolo had _saved_ them, and in all probability, that had cost him his life.

There must have been divisions in the Galra people. Rebel groups, or political factions with different ideas about how to deal with places like Earth. Val didn’t care how scary Zarkon was, no one could unite an entire _species_ without someone striking out on their own. Maybe some of them could actually be allies. Hell, at this point Val would take anyone, so long as they had ships and weapons on par with Zarkon’s.

Well, she’d have to ask Nyma about it later. If she caught her in a good mood.

Val didn’t know any of the refugees in the knot by the open storage locker by name, though she did recognize the Black woman with the scar across her face as one of the ones who had some weapons training. And not just weapons training, Val guessed. Where almost everyone else was on the verge of breaking down, this woman’s face looked hard enough to crack nuts on, and it was obvious she was the one in control of this little group. A soldier, maybe? She did look the tiniest bit like Iverson when he was trying to swing his big stick around.

“We looking for food?” Val asked hopefully as she approached.

The lady soldier eyed Val, then shifted, subtly allowing Val a place in the circle. A quick glance showed a ring of awed faces. They must have recognized her as the one who’d instigated the breakout. Val squirmed, trying to ignore the glances. (Really, though, what had _she_ done? Tased one guard, then shouted a lot until everyone got moving. That was it. No reason to look at her like that.)

“We’ve been taking stock,” the soldier said. “There are plenty of clothes and weapons down here, but we haven’t found the food stores.”

Val frowned at the mention of weapons, but focused on the food for now. These people had been captives not long ago, many of them tortured. They deserved to feel safe. “Is it just this room?”

“There’s another storage room off that way.” The woman nodded toward the back of the ship. “And there’s the elevator. We were just about to go check it out.”

Val was already shaking her head. “There’s nothing up there. Just the cockpit, some kind of maintenance access, and Nyma’s quarters. Which are basically _in_ the cockpit so, meh.”

“Nyma?” asked one of the other refugees, a woman who looked too tiny in her borrowed clothes.

“The woman who saved us.”

“You know her?” asked a young man, wide-eyed. “How much of this did you have _planned_?”

Val snorted. “You think I _planned_ that rescue?” She glanced around around and realized that, yes, they actually did think that. “No,” she said. “ _Hell_ no. My plan was to steal a ship and pick a direction at random, then hope we found someone friendly before we died.”

A collection of uneasy looks passed around the group, and Val realized that they’d built her up as some kind of tactical genius, or a psychic, or something. They’d probably been hoping she would take charge and somehow make sure they all ended up back on Earth, safe and sound with their families.

It was best she disabuse them of that notion quickly. If Val were half of what they thought of her, then Luis wouldn’t be lying dead on the floor of a Galra prison ship right now.

The loss hit her anew, the pain she thought had run its course flaring up again and making her want to sit down and cry her eyes out from now until whenever she woke up from this nightmare. It hurt all the worse because she wasn’t even sure she’d considered Luis a friend. There was a certain camaraderie that came from sharing a cell, from electrocuting guards together as you fled toward death and the hope of escape—but she’d never really known him. Did he have family? How had he ended up in Galra custody? Had any of the other prisoners known him? Val should have known these things about him, but she didn’t.

She just knew he was gone, and that he’d probably still be here if he hadn’t come back for her.

The other refugees were talking again, though several of them still watched Val in concern. She closed her eyes, tried to focus. “Look,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’ll just go ask Nyma about the food. It’ll be faster than searching on our own.”

The soldier woman nodded, then walked with Val to the elevator door. “You think we can trust her?” she asked, once they’d left the others behind.

“Nyma?” Val opened her mouth to say yes, then hesitated. Nyma had seemed… volatile last night. Val was mostly sure that was down to a lack of sleep and the fact that she’d just lost her friend, but could she be certain? “I think so,” Val said at length. “But I’m still going to keep an eye on her.”

The woman flashed a smile. “I can see why you were the one who figured out how to escape.”

“Oh?”

The woman tapped the side of her head. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You don’t panic under pressure, and you don’t go all dewy-eyed the first time someone shows you a scrap of kindness.”

Val snorted, thinking of the shouting match she’d exchanged with Nyma. Kindness? Hardly. “My brain’s all I’ve got. I figure I might as well use it.”

With a laugh, the woman held out her hand for Val to shake. “We didn’t have time for proper introductions last night. I’m Eniola Layeni. Most people just call me Layeni.”

“Val Mendoza.”

Layeni raised two fingers to her brow in salute. “Good to have you here, Val.”

“Even better if I can find us some food, right?” Val grinned, made an effort to mimic the two-fingered salute, then stepped into the elevator. “Be back soon.” Once the door was closed, Val sighed, slumping against the back wall. She wondered which was worse, dealing with refugees who thought she had it all together or facing Nyma, who probably thought she was the biggest annoyance in the galaxy.

Nyma was asleep when Val entered, and Val nearly turned around and went right back down to the cargo hold, except she felt an absurd desire to not disappoint Layeni. So she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and rapped her knuckled against the elevator doors.

“Nyma?” she called. “You up?”

There was a snort, a groan, and an unfamiliar shoe suddenly flying toward her. It struck the wall several feet away, but Val’s pulse still quickened, and she had to remind herself again why she was here. She could _do_ this. She could.

“What’s the matter with you?” Nyma mumbled. “Can’t a girl get some beauty sleep around here?”

She didn’t sound as combative as last night, just a normal level of grouchy, so Val poked her head out of the vestibule around the elevator and maintenance hatch, leaning her shoulders into the crew quarters. “Sorry. We were just wondering if there’s some food stores somewhere.”

Nyma had one arm draped across her face, but she lifted it now to squint at Val. “What, the goo dispenser not good enough for you?”

Val blinked once, resisting the urge to wrinkle her nose at the word _goo_ used in conjunction with food. “I’m going to go ahead and assume that that’s a real thing and you’re not just messing with me.”

With a dramatic sigh, Nyma rolled off her bunk and kicked it with her heel. The bunk automatically retracted into the wall. “Here,” Nyma said, crossing to a control panel and retractable nozzle set into the wall by the bed. She grabbed a bowl from an alcove beneath the nozzle, then squeezed the trigger to dispense a bright green substance that looked more like toothpaste than anything edible. Nyma shoved the bowl into Val’s chest. “There’s something just like this down in the hold by the elevators. You can’t miss it.”

“This is _food_?” Val asked dubiously. But Nyma just stared at her, so Val dipped her finger in and tasted a little bit of the goo. It was almost as slimy as it looked, but it didn’t taste terrible. And Val was hungry enough that she didn’t care much beyond that. She spotted a spoon by the bowls and speared it into her goo, but made herself wait before she dug in. “Hey, uh, Nyma?”

“What?” Nyma snapped.

Val stiffened her spine and followed Nyma into the cockpit. “Have you ever heard of something called Voltron?”

Frowning, Nyma eyed her. “Why?”

“I need to find them,” Val said. “I need to convince them to come help Earth.”

For a long moment, Nyma said nothing. Then she sighed, rubbing tired eyes. “I know someone who might be able to get us in touch with the paladins, but are you sure? No one would blame you if you found somewhere quiet to start a new life.”

“My family’s still on Earth. I’m not going to leave them to the Galra.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would.” Nyma pursed her lips, then dropped into her seat at the controls. “Go get everyone fed. I’ll let you know when we’re there.”

* * *

Most of the Mendoza family was adventurous in one way or another, though most weren’t quite so risking-bodily-harm-adventurous as Val’s cousin Lance. Lance and Val’s fathers had gone mountain biking and rock climbing as young men, and they still sometimes took a weekend to go hike the trails outside Carlsbad. Val’s mother had never met a culinary challenge she wouldn’t undertake. Her brother Sebastian took his adventure in the form of epic fantasies.

And Val? Val asked the questions no one else wanted to ask—of the people no one else wanted to confront. Her mentor in the New Mexico State journalism program said it was one of the things that made her a good reporter. She got in people’s faces, asked uncomfortable questions, and didn’t back down until she had her story.

Once or twice, depending on whether you counted accidents involving flying fruit, Val’s particular brand of adventurousness had won her a black eye. Once she’d caught a cold braving an unexpected spring rainstorm to track down a local politician who’d been dodging questions about the latest scandal for three days.

Admittedly, landing herself in space jail took the gold in the ‘Ramifications of Dumb Shit’ Olympics, but Val had plenty of practice licking her own wounds.

She remembered the first time, when she was still writing for her high school paper and had accidentally gotten on the wrong side of the star quarterback. She’d written a scathing report on the way he ridiculed his teammates and disrespected the cheerleaders, and as a result his then-girlfriend (an entirely decent girl who happened to have a thing for jocks) dumped him.

Now, Val couldn’t be sure it was him who tripped her, possibly because she’d broken her nose when she fell face-first into the lockers and the pain had made her momentarily forget about everything else. But she could infer.

She was supposed to watch Lance and his siblings the next day while both their parents went to see a show, but her headache remained strong enough that she didn’t trust herself to wrangle a ten-year-old, let alone five- and three-year olds.

So Val had Lance’s favorite babysitter, a twenty-something named Lena, as backup for the evening. Which, as it turned out, meant Lance kept Mateo occupied in the living room while Val, Lena, and Luz watched cartoons in the master bedroom.

“Still wanna be a reporter?” Lena had asked, flashing a lopsided smile as Val draped a damp washcloth across her nose.

Val would have snorted if she’d been able to breath through her swollen nose. “Duh.”

Lena turned her head away from the TV and arched an eyebrow. “Even after the...” She gestured vaguely to her own face, and Val grimaced as she thought of the dark bruises spreading outward from her nose.

“Sarah texted me after school today,” Val said, getting more comfortable on her pillow pile. “The guy who did it got kicked off the football team _and_ got suspended for two days. I’d say I came out ahead.”

With an incredulous laugh, Lena sat up and caught the doll Luz was playing with before it could slide off the bed. “Anything for a story, I guess.”

“Anything to make jerks realize they can’t just do whatever they want because they’re popular,” Val said.

She’d meant it then—and she meant it now. Some causes were worth putting yourself on the line.

* * *

Nyma’s friends—the ones who were going to point Val in the direction of Voltron—were aliens. Val supposed that was only to be expected, but still, standing at the top of the _Harbinger’s_ ramp with Nyma and Layeni, Val felt very, _very_ out of place. The other refugees clustered together somewhere behind them, apparently too scared to venture out of the ship. Val didn’t blame them. She’d rather be hiding under a blanket somewhere.

Layeni turned toward the cowering refugees. “We’ll be back soon,” she said, just loud enough to carry. “Just sit tight.”

Val eyed her. “You sure you want to come?”

“We’re responsible for these people,” Layeni said. “You got them out of hell, and for some inexplicable reason I decided to take charge of the aftermath. That means _we_ have to find them a way home.”

Nyma glanced at Val, artfully raising one eyebrow, which Val did her best to ignore. Okay, so she hadn’t told Layeni about her plan to track down Voltron. It didn’t involve her, and Val _was_ planning on helping the others get home, ultimately. She just wasn’t going about it the way Layeni expected.

Thankfully, Nyma didn’t seem inclined to get involved, and she led them down the ramp as Val hung back to study Layeni's face. She put on a brave face, but Val was almost sure she'd seen the woman red-eyed as she came out of the storage space last night.

"Doesn't all this scare you at all?" Val asked.

Layeni narrowed her eyes, watching the corners of the hangar as though expecting an attack. "I'm scared out of my goddamn mind. Have been since I got taken. Doesn't mean I can afford to act like it."

Val opened her mouth to offer her support, then shut it. She hardly knew Layeni. Even if the other woman wanted a shoulder to cry on, it probably wasn't Val's.

By now, two of the aliens had broken off from the rest, greeted Nyma by name, and offered to take her to Anamuri, whoever that was.

Val stuck close behind Nyma as they traversed the ship, trying not to look as scared as she felt. Everything was just so… different. It was hard not to flinch away from aliens that looked like bears and beetles and dinosaurs— _dinosaurs!_ Now, granted, the dinosaur alien who swiftly and silently joined the procession was wearing a grease-stained blue dress with flowers on the hem, which didn’t exactly scream “predator.”

But Val was perfectly happy holding onto her paranoia. On Earth or in space, paranoia kept you alive.

On the up side, Val wasn’t the only one who seemed ready to jump out of her skin. Layeni’s hand kept dropping to her waist, where she’d clipped a pistol she’d taken from Nyma’s arsenal. Nyma glared at Layeni every time her hand moved, and their escorts—Dino Girl, Lion-O, and Sonic the Eight-Foot-Hedgehog—all looked like they’d rather be guarding some _other_ ex-prisoners. Maybe someone with sharp teeth and a weaker sense of self-preservation.

Dino Girl (Jeya, she’d called herself) kept up a steady stream of chatter that, in another situation, Val might have found relaxing. If the entire rest of the _Hope of Kera_ hadn’t seemingly adopted a vow of silence, like Val and her companions had trespassed somewhere they _really_ shouldn’t have.

“Is it always like this?” Val hissed, stepping up behind Nyma. “So… tense?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been past the hangar.”

Val frowned at the back of Nyma’s head. “I thought you worked with these people.”

“I do. Doesn’t mean they’re all okay having a half-Galra coworker.”

Val read a warning in Nyma’s too-smooth face and dropped the issue, her heart clenching.

Jeya, unfortunately, didn’t seem to notice something was amiss. “Hey, yeah,” she said, abandoning her story about an electro-zello-something-or-other she’d been fixing. “Where _is_ Rolo? Back with the other refugees or something?”

Nyma’s lips turned downward. “He’s dead.”

Jeya stopped walking, her eyes going wide. “ _Dead_?” she squeaked. “But— _what?_ ”

Nyma didn’t answer, and Val avoided looking at any of them. From Jeya’s devastated expression and the soft sound of dismay that escape Lion-O the guard, these people had been Rolo’s friends. She wondered how many of them would trade Val and all the other refugees for Rolo without a second thought.

She wondered how many were glad the half-Galra was out of the picture.

The whole situation just made her chest ache, so she kept her head down and followed the rest of their little entourage to a nondescript conference room that reminded Val entirely too much of the interrogation rooms on Vanda’s ship. Layeni seemed to be thinking the same thing, for when everyone else took a seat at the table in the middle of the room, Layeni joined Val near the wall, where they could see a slice of the hallway through a slit in the door.

After a few minutes, they were joined by a short, mole-like alien the crew all addressed as Commander. Well, damn. Apparently Nyma was more of a big shot than she’d let on. Not that Val was complaining. Better to jump straight to the top than waste time going through all the red tape.

Still, she would have appreciated a little warning.

Several seconds ticked by while everyone stared around the room. The Commander’s eyes fell on Layeni’s pistol and narrowed, Nyma did her best not to acknowledge any of them, and Val couldn’t help feeling like everyone was staring at her. She supposed she must look as strange to all of them as they did to her.

Finally Commander Anamuri sighed and spread her hands on the table, her blunt claws whispering across the surface. “I’ve reviewed your report, Nyma.”

“Then you know we’re fucked.”

Val stared hard at the back of Nyma’s head, frowning. She didn’t actually know why Nyma had showed up on Vanda’s ship, or why Rolo had been willing to sacrifice himself in the rescue, or what any of these people intended to do with Val and the others. She didn’t think they planned on taking captives—Val certainly didn’t _feel_ like a prisoner now—but she wondered if trusting Nyma had been the smartest choice.

Anamuri knuckled her forehead, looking tired. “Project Balmera… We should have expected something like this.”

“Wait.” Val straightened, her heart pounding. “You know about that? About the crystals?”

Layeni’s breath hissed out between her teeth, and the look she gave Val—sharp-eyed and suspicious—said she was one of the prisoners who’d been drafted into Vanda’s experiments.

Nyma’s head lolled back, and she sighed toward the ceiling. “Of _course_ we know about it. Got the tip a couple days ago and went to check it out. Why do you think we were there?”

Val didn’t know how to answer.

“Nyma and Rolo were able to access the ship’s computers before they found you,” Anamuri explained. “We haven’t had a chance to go through everything, but it seems the Galra have discovered a new power source.”

“Discovered?” Val laughed once, incredulous. “No, they’ve _made_ a new power source. _Us._ ” She tugged the loose collar of her borrowed jacket aside to reveal the reddened scar on her collar bone. “They stuffed us full of crystals so we could—what? Power their refrigerators?”

“Their ships,” Nyma said softly.

Val gaped at her. “ _What?_ ”

Nyma’s head tipped further back until she was staring at Val, her violet eyes too intense for her careless posture. “They planned to use you to power their ships. They’ve been killing off so many Balmera with their mining operations they can’t get enough crystals to power their armada, so...” She trailed off, twirling a hand in the air. “Human Balmera.”

“The crystal shortage was one of the few advantages we had in this war,” Anamuri said. “If the Galra have found a way around that--”

“Sorry,” Layeni said suddenly, every line of her body reading tension. Her voice was dry, her dark eyes hard as she stared the Commander dead in the eyes. “Not to downplay the tactical significance of our _torture_ , but I don’t really care about this war of yours.”

Anamuri raised an eyebrow. “ _Our_ war? This is your war now, too, child.”

“Oh, no.” Layeni raised a hand to her matted hair and grimaced. “No thank you. This isn’t our fight, ma’am; we’re just trying to get home.”

“Your home is a battlefield now,” Anamuri said gently. “The Galra don’t care that you don’t want to fight. They _will_ kill you if they find you.”

“If you’re lucky,” Nyma added. “They might just stick you back in those cells of yours and keep on with the crystal shit.”

Layeni closed her eyes, looking shaken. “What, then? You expect us to stay here? Live the rest of our lives with strangers? Forgive me, but the last aliens I met cut me open and experimented on me. I doubt I’ll be the only one who’s less than enthusiastic about taking up your offer of hospitality.”

“Fine,” said Nyma. “Then maybe Anamuri will give you a shuttle, and you can go off and die alone.”

“Nyma...” Jeya whispered. Nyma just huffed and propped her boots up on the table.

Val hesitated for a moment, working up her courage. “Or,” she said slowly, “we could drive the Galra out.”

With a glance to the guards, Lion-O and Sonic, Anamuri shook her head. “I can’t promise that,” she said. “We’re hardly a day past a major battle ourselves, and our losses were… non-negligible. I don’t know if we would be able to fight off a Galra fleet on our own.”

“Okay,” Val said. “Then what about Voltron?”

Five pairs of eyes turned her way—all except Nyma’s, which remained fixed on the ceiling.

“Voltron?” asked Lion-O.

Jeya nibbled on her claw. “That’s not a half-bad idea, actually. You know they’ll want to help once they hear Earth is involved.”

Layeni frowned at her. “Really? _Why_?”

“Because they’re humans, too. Well, some of them.”

_Humans._

The paladins were _humans?_

Val put the breaks on her racing thoughts before she could reach the conclusion waiting for her at the end of the tracks. There were literal billions of humans out there. The Galra had been taking prisoners, and Val’s group, at least, had escaped. Others could have done the same. Hell, for all Val knew, a different race of aliens might have come and abducted other humans twenty years ago, and _they’d_ gone on to become the paladins of Voltron.

All these logical reminders did very little to counter the hope swelling in her chest.

“You… didn’t know,” Jeya said slowly, glancing at Nyma, who tensed.

“It didn’t come up,” Nyma said.

Val felt like, maybe, she should have been mad that Nyma hadn’t thought to mention that the Voltron paladins might not need to be convinced to help Earth. She couldn’t work herself up to anger. Lance was… Lance might be…

Her knees were shaking as she stepped forward, looking from one face to another. “Who?” she asked. “What are their names?”

“Well, there’s Pidge,” said Jeya, beaming. She seemed not to notice when Val fell into an empty seat, her eyes watering. _Pidge._ How many Pidge’s could there be in the universe? It had to be Pidge Holt. Lance’s comms officer. One of the missing cadets. Karen's younger kid. “They came here with Hunk and Coran a couple months ago and helped us out. And--”

“And Lance?” Val asked, holding her breath. There was no way. No way in all the universe her cousin could be a paladin. Could be fighting. Could be free.

But Nyma just snorted, her face going sour. “Unfortunately, yeah. He is.”

It didn’t matter that Nyma sounded just about as enthusiastic as if someone had handed her a dead rat. The weight of months of grief and fear and fury collapsed on top of Val in that instant, and before she knew it she was sitting on the floor of an alien space ship, surrounded by strangers, sobbing her eyes out.


	3. Among the Stars

“Thank you,” Val said in a halting voice. “For doing this.”

Nyma shrugged with a practiced disinterest, ignoring the guilt pulling tight between her shoulder blades. “It’s not like anyone else was gonna do it,” she said. Anamuri had tried to contact Voltron, but no one answered the comms hail—probably because one of their own had been captured--and with the rebellion in rough shape following their recent battle, that left no one free to escort distrustful ex-prisoners across the universe to coordinates already twenty hours old with no way to know if they'd find friends on the far side or only Galra.

Nyma might have been more sympathetic about the paladins' plight if, one, she’d had more than a five-minute conversation with Takashi Shirogane; two, she wasn’t running on far too little sleep; and three, she wasn’t still struggling to come to terms with her own loss.

Well, sympathy or no, when Val and Layeni had flatly refused Anamuri’s offer of refuge for the days or weeks until Voltron got in touch, Nyma had volunteered to shuttle all sixteen humans to Voltron’s last known coordinates.

It would be easier if Val had banished that stupid doe-eyed look of gratitude, or at least taken it down to the cargo hold where Nyma didn’t have to see it.

“I wish there was some way I could repay you,” Val said.

Nyma tensed, keeping her eyes on the viewscreen ahead of her. Anamuri had warned her of possible Galra scouts in the area, which meant Nyma had to slog through half a day of sub-light travel and two precautionary wormhole detours. Half a day of gratitude Nyma _really_ didn’t deserve.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nyma said. The words made her sound like some kind of generous do-gooder from the stories she’d heard growing up. That made her feel sleezy, but what was she supposed to say? ‘Don't worry about payment, Val. You _are_ my meal ticket’? Hell, no.

“So how’s this supposed to work?” Val asked, pulling her bare feet up onto the cushion of the copilot seat—Rolo’s seat. It would always be Rolo's seat to Nyma, and it irked her to see a stranger sitting there. Nyma wanted to tell her to put her feet down, but her self-loathing hadn't quite progressed to the point of picking fights with one of the few people in the universe who actually seemed to see something good in her.

“How’s what supposed to work?” Nyma asked instead, managing to only sound a little waspish.

Val waved one hand toward the viewscreen. “This. We have their coordinates, right? So can’t you just… open a wormhole or something?”

“Not from _here_.”

“Why not?”

Nyma breathed out sharply. She wasn’t going to do this. She _wasn't_. Not with Val. Nyma had already won the everlasting hatred of enough people without shitting on Val for the simple fact that her voice was a constant reminder that Rolo was gone and Beezer was a hunk of unresponsive metal in the cargo bay.

But Val had already deflated at Nyma’s huff, and she sat now fiddling with the ends of her sleeves. She’d dug through the clothes in the hangar until she found a uniform that had once belonged to a night guard— a plain blue shirt and slacks that hung loose on Val’s painfully thin frame.

“The Empire is watching this area,” Nyma said, frustration making her voice sharp. “We have to get farther away or we risk picking up some unwanted tagalongs.”

“Okay, jeez. Sorry for asking.” Val leaned her head back against the seat and sighed, wrapping her arms around herself.

Another pang of guilt went through Nyma, and she nearly spilled the truth right there. In some ways it would have been easier to speak up. To let Val see exactly who she’d aligned herself with.

_What kind of reward do you think the paladins would give to someone who saved a member of their family, Val? What do you think you’re worth to your cousin? Enough to make them go back for Rolo?_

If Nyma had any real hope that Rolo had survived, she might not have felt like such a bitch for doing this. But she knew Rolo had probably been executed within an hour—and she was going to leverage Val against the paladins anyway. She had to. She couldn’t get through to whatever was left of Rolo without them.

“Is… there anything I can do to help?” Val asked after a long moment.

The offer—as selfless and considerate as Nyma was pretending to be—drove another spike into the already bloodied skin of her guilt, and she forgot all her intentions about remaining pleasant.

“Actually, if you could maybe _not_ distract me while I try to do three people’s jobs at once, that would be _fantastic_.”

Val’s feet hit the floor with a _thump,_ and for a second, Nyma thought she’d actually managed to chase Val off. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. But Val didn’t head for the door at the back of the cockpit. Instead, she just dug her fingers into the armrests and turned a scowl on Nyma.

“Okay, seriously. _What_ is your problem?”

Nyma scoffed, reaching to the side to start a long-range scan, which wasn’t strictly necessary but did serve to keep her face turned away from Val’s prying eyes. “I just told you. I’m trying to do the work of my entire crew on my own. Sorry if I’m a little stressed, princess.”

Air hissed through Val’s teeth. “And I _just_ offered to help. So maybe listen next time instead of jumping down my throat?”

“Oh, _I’m sorry.”_ Nyma turned around, splaying her hand out on her chest in mock surprise. “Did I miss the part where you learned how to fly a VK-228? Or maybe the part where you studied deep space navigational techniques? Did Vanda give you private lessons while she was torturing you?”

Nyma knew at once that she’d crossed a line. Val paled, and her knuckles blanched as she clung to the armrests. She closed her eyes, and a vein stood out at her jaw as she clenched her teeth.

“Shit,” Nyma whispered, her mouth running dry. “Val, I didn’t--”

“Forget it,” Val said. “Just—Just shut up.”

Nyma’s mouth clicked shut, and she tired her damnedest to focus on flying and not on the way Val’s face wavered between a pinched, agonized expression and something much closer to tears.

Apologies had never come easily to Nyma. She’d always been who she was, and she’d figured anyone who didn’t like her wasn’t worth her time. It was a number of years before she realized she’d driven everyone away with her sharp tongue, her unforgiving opinions, and her unfortunate tendency to speak before she thought her words through.

She never had figured out what it was that had made Rolo stick around.

For a few minutes, both women were silent, the cockpit stuffed full of awkward unspoken accusations and apologies. Nyma tried to find a way to undo her thoughtless comment, but if she was bad at staying civil in the first place, she certainly didn’t have the gift of making amends.

Eventually, Val breathed out, long and slow. “Look,” she said, her voice wavering a bit as she visibly struggled for composure. Her mouth hung open for a long moment, like she was trying to force herself to continue, and when she finally did, her face was wan with tension. “I can’t just _sit here_ and do nothing. You don’t know what it’s like, going through the kinds of things I’ve been through. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back there. Every time I hear someone coming up behind me, I freeze. Every single second I’m not doing something to distract myself, it all comes creeping back in.”

“I’m sorry,” Nyma said. Sorry for what Val had been through. Sorry for bringing it up again. Sorry that she was going to take advantage of Val’s trauma to help her own goddamn cause.

Val leaned her elbow on the armrest and propped her cheek on her fist, staring at the wall beside her. “It’s fine. I thought, maybe, since you’re short on crew members right now, we might be able to help each other out. You teach me to fly this thing, or navigate, or whatever. You get the help you need, I get my distraction. But if you don’t want me here, fine. Just give me something else to do. I’ll swab your goddamn decks if you want me to, just—Please, Nyma.”

Nyma wanted to send Val off toward some pointless chore that would keep her out of the cockpit and give Nyma the privacy she wanted. She really did.

But damn it all, Val’s suggestion made too much sense. The _Harbinger_ just wasn’t intended to be flown solo. You could do it, in a pinch, but not for long. The first time Rolo had tried it, he’d wrecked the ship on a lonely little asteroid in the middle of nowhere. By the time Nyma came along, he’d already instituted the rule that no one flew without Beezer there to navigate.

But Beezer wasn’t here now. Maybe Val wasn’t the ideal replacement… but Nyma wasn't in a position to be choosy.

With a sigh, she leaned over and pulled up a display on Val’s side of the dash. “Okay. You wanna learn? I’m not gonna babysit you just because you’re new to this.”

“Good.” The barest hint of a smile tugged at Val’s lips. “I might have punched you if you’d tried.” She paused, her eyes darting to the side of Nyma’s face, where Nyma knew there was a large, dark bruise at the spot where Val had clocked her with the barrel of a gun. “Again.”

“I’m going to get you back for that, you know,” Nyma said, smirking.

Val shoved her arm aside, eyes glowing. “Go ahead and try, bright-eyes. I’ve survived worse.”

Nyma didn’t doubt that.

* * *

Nyma’s first crew was, in many ways, a crash course in intergalactic criminal society. She’d left home with dreams of seeing the stars locked carefully away behind more practical concerns—namely, earning enough money to get her family out of debt. She hadn’t cared that the captain of the _Ylesvian_ had hired her only for her looks. She hadn’t cared that her one and only responsibility on the ship was to act as a distraction to keep security off the rest of the team.

She hadn’t cared (much) that the sixteen-year-old runaway wasn’t allowed in the cockpit under any circumstances.

It was a paycheck. She couldn’t let it matter more than that.

The thing was, she was good at what she did. However much she _wanted_ to be a pilot, she _was_ a seductress—and a skilled one at that. Sixteen years old, and she could have any man she chose dancing on the tip of her finger while her crewmates stole his wealth right out from under him. Sixteen years old, and already she had the universe believing she would fuck anyone who paid her one measly compliment.

Every day she told herself this was what she had to do. To make them all believe. To play the part—just long enough for the others to finish the job. She never lingered long enough to see the act through to the ugly end, anyway, so what did it matter?

She told herself that it would get better. The crew of the _Ylesvian_ would accept her as one of their own. They would see that she knew how to handle herself under pressure. They would use her talents, and not just her looks. One day, maybe, they would let her take a more active role in their jobs. They would teach her to fly.

They never did.

She spent less than a year with the _Ylesvian_ before she screwed up. There was no reason for it, not really. Maybe she was distracted because a thief tried to cut her purse in the market. Nyma grabbed his hand and handcuffed him to a lamppost before he could claim his prize, and the crew came thundering out of the ship, spoiling for a fight.

Nyma, scenting bloodlust, got out of the way and stayed there—right up until she realized the captain was aiming for more than a sound beating.

She’d never figured out what it was that made her speak up. Maybe that the stranger was only a couple years older than her, thin and scraggly in a way that told her he’d been fending for himself for a long time. Maybe it was that he didn’t try to fight the beating, just ducked his head between his arms and weathered the blows without a sound. Maybe it was that it was Nyma’s handcuffs holding him there, which made everything else that happened her responsibility.

It couldn’t have been the fact that he had Galra blood, because any intelligent person would have taken that as a reason to turn right around and walk the other way.

Except Nyma had been living on the fringes of the Galra Empire long enough by now to know that anyone could be cruel and anyone, even a Galra, could just be trying to keep his head down and not get on anyone’s bad side.

She stepped forward before she could talk herself out of it, grabbed her captain’s hand as he pulled back for another blow, and hissed, “You sure now’s the time to be doing this?”

“He’s Galra,” the captain shot back. “Who d’you think’s gonna care what happens to him?”

Nyma glanced at the young Galra thief, whose small, dark eyes were watching her from underneath his elbow. “Look, we all know you could shoot him now and no one would turn you in—but it _would_ attract attention.” She firmed her jaw, trying to pretend she wasn’t a good five years younger than anyone else on her crew, and infinitely lower on the ship’s hierarchy. “We don’t want to be noticed yet, Captain.”

He’d stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment before yanking his arm out of her grip, backhanding her across the face for _insubordination_ , then whistling for the men to get a move on with their duties.

Nyma didn’t look back at the Galra thief as she walked away, but she could feel his eyes burning into the back of her head until the crowd filled in between them.

* * *

It was her own damn fault that the job went south. She was doing the same thing she’d done a hundred times before. Sweet-talk the mark. Get him comfortable. Get him drunk. Make him think there was nothing in the whole universe but himself and the pretty little stranger cozying up to him.

But she couldn’t get the Galra thief out of her head. She kept seeing the violet blood trickling from his nose. The patch of hair that had been ripped out of his head, leaving little dark, wet spots at the white roots. The confusion in his eyes when Nyma stood up for him.

It had been a stupid thing to do, and she knew the captain was going to make her pay for it when this job was over. She should have just walked away and let the men do whatever it was they wanted to do.

It was a big, mean universe out there, and Nyma was barely taking care of herself. She couldn’t afford to take on any charity cases.

If not for the thief, Nyma would have realized sooner that her mark had caught onto the game. If not for the thief, she never would have given herself away to begin with. But her concentration was shot, and she was flustered and shaky and kept losing track of her own damn story, and before she quite knew what was happening, she found herself playing hostage while the mark tried to barter with the crew for the return of his fortune.

Nyma knew before the captain said a word that she was on her own. The _Ylesvian_ didn’t come back for stragglers. It especially didn’t come back for sixteen-year-old nobodies whose only job was to be the bait.

So when somebody kicked down the door and shot the mark in the arm, Nyma didn’t immediately process that she was being rescued. She didn’t process it until there was a purple hand wrapped around her elbow and a rough voice shouting at her to, “Get off your ass and run, sweetheart, I know you’re not helpless.”

One daring chase across the city later, Nyma found herself sitting in the cockpit of an unfamiliar ship, staring out at stars she’d never seen with quite so much clarity.

“Why’d you save me?” she asked, pulling her foot away from the over-eager cash register that seemed to serve as the Galra thief’s first mate.

He’d flashed a lopsided smile as he entered coordinates into the nav computer. “I always repay a debt,” he said, as if he owed her something for leaving him bleeding and handcuffed to a pole. “Besides, me and Beezer could use a hand here on the _Harbinger_ , if you’re willing to learn.”

* * *

Val started to fade a few hours into the flight. First it was yawns interrupting her as she called out all-clears and relayed their location to Nyma. Nyma didn’t comment on the yawns, partially because she knew no one on this ship had slept well last night, partially because Val had proved a quick learner and having an extra set of eyes on the instruments had eased a considerable amount of Nyma’s tension. They’d worked in relative silence, only really speaking when Val had a question.

Nyma waited until she was sure of her heading, then glanced at Val, who was leaning her head on her hand and blinking blearily at the screen before her.

“Why don’t you get a little more rest?”

Val breathed in deeply and sat up. “I’m fine.”

“I mean it,” Nyma said. “I’ve got things covered for the next couple hours, and I’m going to need you sharp when we’re ready to wormhole outta here.”

Val hesitated, covering another yawn. “You sure you don’t mind?”

Nyma waved a hand. “Rolo and I always take it in shifts.” She managed to smile through the pang of hurt that followed, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to acknowledge that she’d always had Beezer for company when Rolo was off-duty.

But Val either took Nyma’s words at face value or was too tired to argue with the out Nyma was giving her, because she curled up in her seat without another word and was asleep a few minutes later.

For a while, Nyma flew on, letting the sound of Val’s breathing soothe her. She would have offered Val the use of her bunk if that was what it took to get the girl to sleep, but the selfish part of her that had had free reign for the better part of twenty-six years was glad she hadn’t needed to. The cockpit wasn’t meant to be silent.

Thoughts of Rolo kept flitting into her mind as she guided them toward an arbitrary star that marked their heading. She thought of Rolo as he’d been when Nyma had first met him: eighteen years old, unfalteringly optimistic, and almost as skittish as Nyma where interpersonal relationships were involved. She thought of Rolo in the height of their rebellion days: more confident at twenty-two than at eighteen but also more vulnerable, at least around Nyma. He’d wanted so badly to make a difference in the universe.

The loss of their crew had hit him hard. They were, to this day, the only people who’d welcomed Rolo without reservation, who’d even gone so far as to consider him a friend. Their deaths had hurt Nyma, but they’d destroyed Rolo. She’d learned to shove her hurts down deep, to funnel them into anger. He’d nearly drowned in the grief. She’d pushed away everyone who’d tried to help her. Everyone but Rolo, who'd held on more tightly the harder she pushed.

They’d been a team for ten years; he’d known things about Nyma she’d never told another soul. He knew about her family, who she couldn’t return to without risking the wrath of the Empire. He knew how deeply her cynicism ran—and that her stubborn, childish hope ran just a little bit deeper.

Rolo and Beezer were her family. The only family she had left, in many ways.

And now they were gone.

Nyma wiped a tear from her eye, scowling at the lonely stars ahead. She wasn’t going to cry, especially not in front of a stranger. Even if that stranger was currently sleeping, mumbling softly as she dreamed.

A few seconds later, the tone of Val’s mumbling changed, pitching higher as her whole body went tense. Nyma looked over, her concern stirring, and watched just long enough to be sure that Val was, in fact, having a nightmare and not simply restless.

“Hey,” Nyma said, reaching out. “Val, hey. Wake up.”

As soon as Nyma touched Val’s shoulder, Val startled awake. She stopped breathing, her eyes wide and sightless as she thrashed, slapping Nyma’s hand away. A second later she was on her feet, stumbling as she tried to put space between them.

Alarmed, Nyma flipped over to autopilot and stood, hands up in a disarming gesture.

“Val?” she asked, inching forward. She was all too aware of the extra head of height she had on Val and tried to make herself smaller and less threatening—something she had plenty of practice with, except that “less threatening” was usually tied up with lying through her teeth and physically holding herself back from stabbing the person on the receiving end of the act. She pressed onward anyway, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Val, you were dreaming. Do you remember where you are?”

Val blinked, her eyes slowly focusing on Nyma. All at once, she started breathing again: desperate, heaving breaths that had the sound of sobs in them. She lifted shaking hands to cover her face, then leaned her back against the wall and slid to the floor.

Hissing a curse, Nyma knelt beside her, reaching out uncertainly. “Hey, it’s okay. It was just a dream.”

Val laughed harshly, choking on her tears. “I wish.”

Faltering, Nyma glanced around the cockpit, looking for someone who actually knew what they were doing. Comforting strangers had always been Rolo’s thing. Mostly Nyma just _made_ people cry.

She bit her lip, settling a hand on Val’s back, alert for signs of distress. After a moment, Val leaned into the touch, and Nyma rubbed small circles on her shoulder. It was probably the single most awkward thing she’d ever done, but what other option did she have? Sit behind the wheel and pretend not to notice Val falling apart on the floor?

“You want to talk about it?” Nyma asked slowly.

Val shook her head.

Nyma shifted position to ease the pressure on her stiff knees. “Okay. Uh… you need anything else? Water? Food? Uh… sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve had to do this sort of thing.”

But Val only wiped her eyes on her sleeve, pushed Nyma’s hand away, and stood on shaking legs.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Is there a bathroom up here?”

“On the left,” Nyma said, gesturing to the door that led to the crew quarters.

Val muttered a thanks and kept her eyes on her boots as she shuffled out of the cockpit, leaving Nyma sitting alone on the cold metal floor.

* * *

Opening a wormhole without a copilot was tricky, but Nyma had gotten good at it sometime during yesterday’s mad dash across the universe. So when Val didn’t reappear from the bathroom after a few minutes, Nyma set about the slow process of inputting her destination and powering up the wormhole generator. She’d mostly managed to get it back in working order yesterday, and Jeya had done a quick patch job of her own, which came with a warning that it was a temporary fix and she should have Pidge or Hunk look at it once she found the paladins. At this moment, though, all Nyma cared about was that it worked.

She opened a wormhole to one of the Kera Rebellion’s defunct relay points, a small moon in an uninhabited system that had once housed supplies and a comms team. It was deserted now, of course, but the moon gave her enough cover to sit and wait for Empire scouts to follow her.

They didn’t come by the time Nyma had reprogrammed the nav computer, so she opened her second wormhole and slipped through. Technically, she should have done one more intermediate jump just to ensure she wasn’t being tailed, but she was tired and sore and fed up with constantly reaching to the other side of the cockpit to check the computer’s calculations, so she just went straight to the coordinates Anamuri had given her.

There was nothing remarkable about the place the wormhole spit her out. There was no traffic, no signs of civilization, and definitely no Castle of Lions.

Groaning, Nyma hammered out a command to open a connection to Anamuri. The _Harbinger_ wasn’t outfitted with the same encryption software as the _Kera—_ or a powerful enough devinali transmitter to pass rebellion muster—so Nyma was limited to text-based communication, but she was sure to flood her few lines of text with as much salt as she could summon.

_Lovely view of the stars out here, but no castle. No ships period, for that matter. What gives?_

Anamuri responded quickly, if briefly: _They must have found a lead on Shiro. We’re looking into it now._

Well, great. Six hours of mind-numbing slog across the system just to find out the Voltron train had left without her. And since the castle had been radio silent since yesterday’s battle, the odds of getting a reply were slim to vanishing. Which meant Nyma was stuck out here with sixteen cold, hungry, frightened humans for the foreseeable future.

She glanced toward the door, wondering (not for the first time) where Val had gone. It had been half an hour now, far too long for someone just trying to regain her composure.

Despite her resolve not to care, Nyma found herself getting worried. She glanced at the instrument panel, then up at the great big nothingness visible outside, then sighed and pushed herself to her feet. Playing therapist wasn’t exactly high on her list of long-haul fun-times, but she wasn’t just going to sit on her pride when Val might be in crisis just outside the door. Nyma had been there once before. She was close again now. She knew how rough it was.

“Val?” she called, opening the door to the crew quarters. Both bunks were still stowed, storage still shut tight. But the bathroom door was closed and glowing with the lock indicator. Frowning, Nyma crossed to the door and knocked lightly. “Everything all right in there?”

There was no answer. None Nyma could hear, anyway, and it set her heart racing. She knocked again, a little louder.

“Val?”

Nothing. Nyma was pounding now, then cursed emphatically and pried the panel off the front of the door controls. There had been a time two years back when this door had been on the fritz, and they’d had to manually override the locks any time they wanted in. Fortunately, Nyma still remembered how to do that, and in less than five seconds she had the door hissing aside.

She spotted Val at once, sitting with her back against the shower door, Rolo’s shears in her hand. Clumps of matted hair dusted her shoulders and covered the floor around her like moss colonies in an alien forest. Val’s hands were shaking, her eyes squeezed shut as she gasped in quick, panicked breaths.

“ _Vrekt_ ,” Nyma hissed, rushing across the room. She pried Val’s hand off the shears, checking her over for signs of blood. There was none—no signs of injury at all except the old bruise on her face and the semi-healed burn across her cheek and ear where she’d been seared by a stray laser. “Val. Val, breathe for me, okay?”

“I can’t,” Val whispered. She made a grab for the shears, then whimpered and folded over on herself, her head dropping between her knees. "I can't."

Nyma shushed her, rubbing her arms. “Just breathe. Come on, Val. You can do it.”

She realized too late that she was parroting Rolo. They’d sat in this room, one month after their crew—their friends—had been blown to pieces, and all the barricades Nyma had built around her emotions had come crashing down over—what? Over nothing. Over a picture she’d found of Tella and her, arm in arm and smiling over their latest take. A relic of the past. A fresh punch to a wound that hadn’t even begun to heal.

She’d sat where Val was now, bowed over that ragged photo, sobbing her heart out while Rolo talked her through the waves of unwanted agony.

Well, Rolo was better at this sort of thing anyway, so Nyma rolled with it. She repeated the phrases Rolo had spouted that day, and though at the time she’d found them trite and hollow, they seemed to be helping Val now. Or at least Nyma’s voice helped.

So she kept talking, feeling like a fool, until Val’s breathing eased out. She was still a huddled ball against the shower, but she seemed more tired now than panicked.

Nyma let the platitudes trail off, her eyes falling on the shears she’d slid toward the far side of the small bathroom. “What were you doing?”

“Trying to cut my hair,” Val said, turning her face toward the wall. She lifted one hand to her hair—ragged and painfully thin now that she’d spent half an hour hacking at it, and still as matted and dirty as ever. “It was bugging me.”

Nyma saw the comb lying a few feet away, several of the teeth bent and broken, clumps of dark, curly hair sticking out of it, and saw the shape of the situation. Hair was a foreign thing to Nyma, as Rylosians were hairless species, but she’d seen a little of that struggle with Rolo. He complained about knots and hacked his hair off when it got too long, and though at first it had turned Nyma’s stomach, she’d eventually come to the conclusion that hair was ten percent decoration, ninety percent hassle.

And Nyma didn’t have to see inside Val’s head to guess her stay in the Empire’s prisons hadn’t been a pleasant one. She’d seen enough in the records she’d stolen.

“Do you want to finish this now, or do you need to step away?” Nyma asked.

Val lifted her head, seemingly surprised, and blinked a few times. Her eyes went to the shears, and she blanched, but steeled herself. “It’s only going to get worse the longer I have to deal with this...this...” She trailed off, lifting a knotted lock of hair off her shoulder.

Nyma nodded, retrieving the shears. “You or me?”

“What?”

“Would you feel more comfortable doing it yourself, or should I?”

Val hesitated longer this time, then abruptly spun around and pulled her hair over her shoulder so it hung down her back. “Be quick about it?”

“Of course,” said Nyma. “How short?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’d shave it all off if I didn’t think I’d take off more skin than hair.”

Her voice was wry, but Nyma heard a generous helping of despair beneath the surface. She sighed, steeled herself, then lifted Val’s hair and hacked it off just above the shoulders with a few merciless cuts. Then she set the shears aside and helped Val toward the sink, where Nyma wet Val's hair and started working through the remaining knots with her fingers. It might have been easier to simply cut these out, as well—and in fact she did have to cut out a few more chunks near the base of Val’s skull—but the hair at the crown of her head was mostly salvageable, and a few tugs didn’t seem to bother Val as much as the rasp of shears beside her ear.

They ended up seated on Nyma’s bunk, Nyma cross-legged behind Val, who sat rigid for a long while before she began to relax. It was slow work, but until Anamuri got back to her, Nyma had literally nothing better to do.

“Thanks,” Val said at one point, making Nyma slow in her work.

“You don't need to thank me, Val.”

Val shook her head, the motion snagging a few knots around Nyma’s fingers. “Really. I-- You’re actually pretty good at this. I wouldn’t have expected it.”

“What, the hair?” Nyma shrugged, teasing apart a tangle behind Val’s ear. “To be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Val laughed at the weak joke and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I don't mean the hair. Well, yes, you're not bad that that, considering. I meant the rest of it. The... comforting. Talking me down. I never pegged you for the caretaker type.”

Val couldn’t have known the knife she’d just tossed at Nyma’s rotten past, but it found its mark nevertheless. She locked up for a second before she remembered her task and started in on the tangles once more.

“I had two sisters,” Nyma said. “Feila and Shaw. Both younger. I never did _this_ , exactly.” She lifted the hair looped around her fingers. “But the principle’s the same.”

Val rested her chin on her knees. “Ah,” she said, a smile in her voice. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

Val turned her head just slightly, catching Nyma’s gaze. “This seemed familiar for some reason. Now I get it.” She sighed, closing her eyes and leaning into the steady motion of Nyma’s hands. “You’d fit right in with my family.”

An unexpected surge of emotion shot through Nyma at that, and she couldn’t speak around the lump in her throat. She smiled, though, a little teary-eyed, and squeezed Val’s shoulder when she reached a lull in her work. Val lifted a hand and rested it atop Nyma’s, her skin warm and calloused, her fingers steady.

They stayed like that for a long moment, and then Nyma quietly got back to work.


	4. False Horizons

Val stared out at the stars, trying not to think about how far she was from home. For the first time in a long time, she thought of her family. Val’s disappearance must have seemed very much like Lance’s, which meant her parents probably thought she was dead. Sebastian had already been struggling to focus on school because of Lance's so-called death. How much worse would it be now?

And what about Luz and Mateo? Val had promised them Lance was alive—and she was _right,_ so take _that_ , Earth—but now that she’d disappeared, how were they supposed to trust her reassurances?

Sighing, Val ran her fingers though her short hair. It was dry and frizzy—lingering damage from two-odd months without a brush or shower. At this point, honestly, it might be easier to just shave her head and start from scratch. The only thing that stopped her was the fact that this was already the shortest her hair had been since middle school. She’d always worn it long, and her hair had always been the one part of her appearance she'd never been insecure about.

 _Well,_ she thought. _I guess that couldn't last forever._

It was a silly thing to get worked up over, but Val started tearing up every time her fingers found the premature end of her hair, like something more than hair had been taken from her.

This was how it was for her now. She lived in emotional extremes—either filled with a tempest that could not be contained, constantly on the verge of tears, panic, rage, or all three. Or she was collapsing in on the vacuum of herself, unable to feel anything at all. The only real peace she’d felt since her escape had been last night, sitting quietly as Nyma worked the tangles from her hair.

Val hadn’t wanted it to end. The peace, the companionship, the contact. There was something intimate about the feel of Nyma’s fingers against her scalp, and Val found herself starving for more.

She stopped that thought right there, glancing self-consciously over her shoulder. Nyma was asleep in the other room, as she’d been up all night (again.) Val had practically had to shove her out of the cockpit, promising all the while that she’d wake Nyma the instant anything changed.

It had been a few hours since then, and Val was starting to get lonely. Today was the third day since the escape, and she’d awoken with a sudden need for human contact—or non-human contact, as the case may be. For months, she’d seen no one but Luis, Yir, and the Galra who had experimented on her. Now Luis was dead, and Yir had stayed on the _Hope of Kera_ to try to get in touch with their family. Val had assured them she didn’t mind—and she hadn’t, at the time. Now, though…

It was like the part of her that was capable of loneliness had shut down during her stay in the Galra prison, only to reawaken now tenfold. She’d pressed close to the other refugees while they all ate breakfast; she'd stood close enough to Layeni to feel her body heat while Layeni set out tasks for the others to complete, to keep them busy, to keep the hollowness at bay.

And now here she was, her knees bouncing, her eyes darting to the door every few seconds. Nyma would wake up soon. Wouldn't she?

Maybe Val should go back there and make sure everything was all right.

No. No, she was being silly. Val stopped herself halfway out of her chair, sat back, crossed her legs, and ran down a mental checklist of all the things Nyma had told her to keep an eye on. Power levels were in the green, scanners showed empty space all around, comms were silent, life support was good to go… and Val was still just as bored and lonely as she’d been two minutes before.

Groaning, Val slumped in her chair, then gave into the urge to go check on Nyma. Just a peek, she told herself. She’d just poke her head in, prove that Nyma was still sleeping (as well she _should_ be), then come back here and find some new way to distract herself. Maybe she’d rehearse the lecture she was going to give Lance about running off to fight evil alien emperors without so much as kissing his mother goodbye.

The door hissed open when Val pressed the switch, and it took her three seconds to realize Nyma was sitting up in bed, staring at a small transparent screen. Nyma’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing as she shoved the tablet under her pillow.

“What is it?” she demanded, launching to her feet. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh…” Val cast about for an excuse, but somehow _I didn’t want to be alone_ seemed like a silly thing to say.

Nyma’s steps slowed, her brows drawing together. “What? What happened? Are we under attack?”

“No,” Val said, and then, because Nyma was still staring at her expectantly, she elaborated. “I was... Bored.”

“Bored.”

Val cringed, congratulating herself on sounding like she was eight years old. “Uh… yes?”

Nyma huffed, brushing past Val. “Seriously. _Bored_? You said you were fine to watch for a few hours.”

That had been before Val realized how physically painful it could be to sit in silence alone in a small, dark room. How much it felt like sitting in a Galra prison cell.

Not that she could say that, of course. She gathered herself, squared her shoulders, and tromped after Nyma. “I just wanted to stretch my legs, okay? I was coming to see if you were still asleep, and if you were, I would have waited another hour or so. It’s no big deal.”

“No big--” Nyma laughed, running her hands down her face. “Val, I get that you’re not used to fending for yourself inside the Galra Empire, but you don’t let your guard down. _Ever._ You do, and we all die.”

Val’s stomach churned at the thought, but she refused to be cowed. “It was _five seconds,_ Nyma. Chill.”

Nyma whirled, and the light caught her face at just the right angle to highlight half-dried tear tracks. The sight of them stole the breath from Val’s lungs and she deflated, replaying the moment Nyma had spotted her in the door. The uneven breaths, the way Nyma had frozen, then hurriedly turned away. This prickliness now.

“--can’t _give_ them five seconds, Val!” Nyma was saying, unaware of Val’s silent revelation.

“Were you crying?”

Nyma cut off mid-rant, and Val had a few heartbeats to realize confronting her like that maybe wasn’t the best idea she'd ever had.

But Nyma didn’t rage, as Val halfway expected her to. A faint blush spread across her nose, and then her expression went blank. “You should go take that walk,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “I’ll keep watch for the rest of the day.”

The dismissal stung more than Val wanted to admit, and she started several different snarky retorts before she spun on her heel and stormed out the door without a single word. So Nyma wanted to be like that, did she? Thought she was too good to let Val see her cry? Fine. Val didn’t care. She stomped out of the cockpit, letting her too-large boots lend weight to her withdrawal.

She stopped in the crew quarters as the door whooshed shut behind her, a shapeless storm raging in her bones. It was a helpless fury, untethered and undirected, and Val _knew_ she had no reason to be so angry. Nyma was proud, and she didn’t like to seam weak, and Val was in no position to judge. Pride and a need to be strong and a burning fury at Iverson were all that had carried her through Lance’s memorial service and the hundreds of insincere well-wishes that followed. She understood too well the need for control.

But her emotions were rampaging out of her control, feeding off themselves and growing into the tempest she’d become all too familiar with since she first set foot on the _Harbinger._

Maybe taking a walk was a good idea.

Her eyes fell on Nyma’s bunk, on the pillow at the head, beneath which Nyma had shoved the tablet she’d been staring at--

No.

Val wasn’t going to snoop. Just because she was pissed off at Nyma? At the universe, really. No. That was no reason to violate Nyma's privacy like this.

But it wasn’t really about Val’s hurt feelings, was it? She just wanted to help Nyma, and in order to do that, she needed to know what the problem was. If Nyma wouldn’t tell her, she’d just have to find out for herself. Right?

That was what she told herself as she tiptoed over to the bunk, glancing back at the cockpit to make sure the door was shut tight. Shame burned in her blood even as she lifted the pillow and plucked up the tablet hidden underneath.

It wasn’t really much of a tablet. A sheet of glass, really, about the size of a largish smart phone, that lit up as Val ran her hand over the surface. It flashed a lock screen, and, frowning, Val tilted it to better see the smudge of fingerprints, then copied the pattern. It took two tries, but then she had free reign of the device.

She didn’t need to go hunting to see what Nyma had been looking at. It was a photo, still called up on the main screen, showing a younger, happier Nyma beaming as a burly alien with green skin, a bald head, and overlarge eyes draped herself over Nyma’s back. They stood in front of a ship—this ship—and there was no mistaking the familiarity and fondness in the other alien’s eyes as she surreptitiously watched Nyma.

Through the door, Val heard Nyma shifting around, muttering to herself. Val hastily slid the tablet back under the pillow and sprinted for the elevator.

* * *

“And Chris is heading up the team in charge of sorting through the clothes.”

Layeni fell silent and Val belatedly realized she’d been zoning out. She’d come down to the hangar twenty minutes ago, glad for the chaos and the company to keep her mind occupied, but her thoughts kept straying back to the picture she’d seen on Nyma’s tablet.

She shouldn’t have looked. She knew that. It hadn’t stopped her from snooping, of course, but it did make her feel sick to her stomach. She caught herself wondering about the other person in the photo—who she was, what had happened to her, how she knew Nyma. It didn’t matter how many times Val told herself it was none of her business. When she saw a question, she dug at it until she had her answer. That was just how she was.

“Sorry,” she said to Layeni. “I know this is important, but my head just isn’t here today.”

Layeni gave her a sympathetic look, which only made Val feel worse. This wasn’t about the Galra, or the crystals growing inside Val’s body. It wasn’t about the nightmares that had kept her up—kept them all up—until the early morning hours.

She just couldn’t stop thinking about Nyma.

Sighing, Layeni reached out to squeeze Val’s shoulders. “We’ll get there. The important thing is to keep busy. Things going okay up there?”

She gestured toward the ceiling and the distant cockpit, and Val narrowly resisted the urge to laugh in her face. “About as well as anything else in my life,” she said dryly, then rubbed her forehead. “No, sorry. It’s fine. Keeping busy, keeping my mind off of… everything else. I just needed some air.”

“Tight spaces,” Layeni said, nodding. “You’re not the only one who’s struggling with that.”

Val was about to brush off the sympathy, but then she noticed the tightness around the other woman’s eyes, the way she glanced at the storage lockers dotting the cargo bay. Val had only been half listening to her report, but she thought Layeni had said something about checking the supplies personally. That must have been a lot of time in those dark metal boxes.

“What about you?” Val asked. “Has anyone checked to make sure you’re okay?”

The corner of Layeni’s mouth quirked upward, but she only shook her head. “I’m holding up. But… thank you. For asking.”

Val shrugged. “We’ve gotta look out for each other,” she said, her hand drifting to the scar on her shoulder before she could stop it. “God knows no one else will.”

Layeni grunted an agreement, touching her own collarbone. They’d done a survey last night after leaving the _Kera._ There had originally been twenty human prisoners on Vanda’s ship. Four had died in the escape, including Luis. Eleven of the sixteen survivors had been drafted for Project Balmera—including Val and Layeni. Each of them had the same scar on their collarbone where the first crystal had been implanted. Most had a small handful of additional scars. None of the test subjects showed signs of any adverse effects from the crystals, but Val couldn’t help worrying. She didn’t trust anything that came from Vanda’s labs, least of all the glittering tumors she’d been gifted with.

Of course, there was nothing to be done at the moment, so Val just had to smile and assure everyone that everything was going to be fine. The paladins of Voltron would know how to help them. (She tried not to think too hard about the fact that Lance was one of those paladins. Lance, for whom Val had always tried to be strong and confident and in control. Lance, who probably still needed her to be his surrogate big sister. Lance, who had only just turned eighteen and was already fighting a war that was bigger than any of them.)

Val sighed, sitting with Layeni on a stack of crates. “How’d I end up in charge of this mess?” she asked.

She didn’t expect an answer, but Layeni just chuckled. “You do what needs doing. You make sure the others know they aren’t alone. Those are the things that turn ordinary people into heroes.”

Heroes? Val shook her head, incredulous. She was no hero. She never had been. She wrote and she told stories, and she let other people do the brave, selfless things that deserved to be written about. Lance--Lance was a hero. Val was just trying to get by.

* * *

Val was eleven the first time Lance invited her to play Space Fighters with him. He was six years old and already obsessed with things beyond their atmosphere—with Star Wars and Star Trek, with tales of Mars and of Venus and of made-up places with funny sounding names.

He was lucky Lena was as accommodating as she was. Any normal babysitter would have gotten tired of watching the same movies time after time after time. But not Lena. Lena let Lance chatter on about Jedi for hours on end. Lena made laser guns out of toilet paper tubes and staged epic battles in the back yard. Lena made up stories about evil alien dictators and the people suffering under their rule, who needed Lance to save them.

Val and Sebastian weren’t quite old enough to watch themselves when their parents went out, so sometimes they spent the afternoon at Lance’s house reading while Lena kept Lance entertained.

Sometimes, though, Lance would invite them to join the latest in a long line of fantastical revolutions.

“You can be a hero, too!” Lance said, crossing his arms on Val’s kneecaps. He beamed up at her, like anyone would be delighted to get the chance to kill imaginary aliens.

Val had just laughed and ruffled his hair. “I’m not as brave as you, baby cousin.”

Lance pouted at the name, flattened his hair, and pouted up at her. “Why not?”

“Because,” she said, tapping him on the nose. “I don’t fight.”

“You fight with Sebastian all the time.”

Val couldn’t really argue with that (especially not when her brother, sitting nearby, snorted into his book in amusement.) “Okay, but that’s different. That’s _bickering_. This is real fighting.” (For a certain definition of the word _real._ ) “This is knight-in-shining-armor stuff. I’m just a bookworm.”

“That just means you know stuff,” Lance argued. “Tía Lena always says you gotta know stuff to win fights.”

Lena came up behind Lance, snatching him into the air and hoisting him over her shoulder as he shrieked with laughter. “The little monster’s right, Val,” she said, grinning. “You could be a hero, too, if you wanted. We could always use more allies in the fight against the wicked King Ooze.”

Lance pushed himself up off Lena’s shoulder, scowling. “We stopped King Ooze _last week_ ,” he said huffily. “It’s Barn Weevil this time.”

“Barn Weevil?” Val asked, raising an eyebrow.

Lena laughed, patting Lance’s flailing leg. “Baron Evil,” she said. “But I like Barn Weevil better.” She tilted her head to the side, holding out her hand. “So what do you say? You in?”

Val sighed, but she’d never been able to say no to Lance’s puppy eyes, and this was certainly no exception. She joined the fight, shooting down three of Barn Weevil’s evil controller drones and clearing the way for Lance to take down the big bad himself, rescuing the fair damsel Sebastian in the process.

She had to admit, it felt kind of nice to be a hero once in a while.

* * *

In the end, Nyma broke down before Val, who had avoided the cockpit for most of the afternoon under the pretense of _giving Nyma space._ The truth was, Val was afraid of making things worse.

But then, in the middle of building something closer to real beds than the haphazard piles of clothes the refugees had been using, the group went suddenly quiet. Val turned to look for the source of the disturbance and found herself standing toe-to-toe with Nyma, who ran her hand down one of her fleshy headtails and stared at the floor.

“I wanted to say sorry. About earlier.” Violet eyes darted up to Val, then back to the floor. “I took my issues out on you, and that was shitty of me.”

Before Nyma could smash her pride into smaller pieces than she already had, Val stepped forward and threw her arms around Nyma’s waist. “I get it,” she said. “And I’m sorry for sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

Nyma’s hand reached up and grasped Val's arm. “Don’t.” Her voice shook, and she dropped it so low even Val could barely hear, and Nyma was talking directly into her ear. “Don't apologize. I was just bitchy because Rolo was always the one who pushed me into opening up and talking through my feelings and all that therapy shit.”

Val laughed, surprising herself. “Well, I don’t know about therapy, but we _are_ trying to build box-springs out of space junk, if you want to lend a hand?”

“Box… springs?” Nyma pulled back to frown at the production happening along the far wall. Val grinned and handed her something that looked like a drill without any bit—which none of the humans had figured out how to use. Nyma stared at it for a long second, then started to laugh, which Val figured was quite a bit better than whatever she’d been doing up there in the cockpit for the last few hours. "Okay," she said. "Just tell me what you need."

* * *

An hour later, the beds were finished—haphazard “mattresses” made of clothes and tarps and something like packing peanuts that held its shape surprisingly well. Some of the refugees were still visibly uncomfortable around Nyma, but Layeni and several others clapped her on the shoulder and thanked her for the help, which really had been invaluable, if only because Nyma was the only one who knew what half of the things on the ship _were._

With the work done, Nyma retreated back to the cockpit, enticing Val along with the promise of a beer. Or, well, Val was pretty sure it was the space equivalent of a beer. Nyma called it _henadt_ , but the way she described it sounded like alcohol, and honestly, that was enough for Val.

The drink turned out to be a little bit stronger than beer, and a little bit less bitter, but with the same comfortable curl in Val’s gut.

One bottle turned to two, and soon Val found her tongue loosening, her thoughts rolling out of her like marbles dropped on a slip-and-slide. She told Nyma about her family, though she was having trouble holding onto the thread of her stories. The time her brother had stolen Val’s Barbies to recreate a scene from Macbeth blurred into the time Val and Lance had adopted a stray cat and shuttled it between their houses for a week before any of the adults found out, which got lost inside an explanation of the U.S. government. (Val honestly couldn’t say how she’d gotten started on that, or why it mattered, but Nyma listened with the same intense focus as she’d had for all the rest of it.)

“Lance really is the best though,” she said, trying to bring herself back to her original point. “I can’t believe he’s a paladin.”

Nyma snorted into her mostly-empty bottle. “You're telling me.”

Val laughed a little louder than was warranted. “What, not a Lance fan? I know he can be a little...” She waved her hands vaguely, making a whooshing sound, and Nyma started giggling. “But he’s a good kid. The best kid. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he’d really run off and got himself killed.”

“You love him,” Nyma said, still smiling. She seemed surprised, and Val frowned at her.

“Of course I do.”

Nyma shook her head before Val could get too worked up, then leaned back in the pilot seat and stared at the ceiling. “Yeah. I guess it was mostly my fault anyway.”

“Your fault?”

“Let’s just say Lance and I have a… rocky past.” She lifted her bottle, knocking back the rest of her space beer, and stared into the mouth of the bottle for a long, heavy moment.

“What about you?” Val asked slowly. “You have a family?”

Nyma shrugged. “Not much to tell.”

“You said you had sisters. Any fun stories?”

“Not really.” Nyma stared at her _henadt_ like she was contemplating getting another one. “Haven’t seen them in ten years.”

Val turned toward her, and the way the ship spun told her alien drinks were, indeed, stronger than your average beer. “Ten _years_? Fuck.”

Nyma’s mouth twitched upward. “Seconded.”

“So, what, it was just you and Rolo out here? Well...” Val frowned. “You and Rolo and that girl.”

“Girl?”

“In the picture. I saw it on your smart phone thing.” Val stifled a yawn and pulled her feet up beneath her on the chair. She was aware that she’d snuck a look at that picture, and that maybe she should be ashamed of her snooping, but she found it startlingly hard to care. “Sorry. I was curious.”

Nyma, to her credit, took it in stride. “Tella.”

Val turned toward her.

“Her name was Tella.” Nyma paused, rolling her empty bottle between her hands. “I think I loved her. She’s dead now, same as everyone else. Rolo. Beezer. Gard. Zek. Arathina.” Her voice shook on the last name, and she paused, clearing her throat. “We all knew what we signed up for. You don’t fight the Empire without a little risk. I just wish it hadn’t been _me_ left standing at the end of it all.”

Val’s heart ached for Nyma, for the raw hurt in her voice, for the watery eyes trying hard not to look directly at Val. Setting her bottle aside, Val turned and reached out toward Nyma, a little unsteady, and squeezed her hand.

“Well I’m glad you made it,” she said with conviction.

Surprise flashed over Nyma’s face, and then her expression wavered, her tears finally spilling over. “Val...” she said. "I don't--You shouldn't--" She closed her eyes, grinding the heel of her hand against her eyelid. "I'm not a good person, Val."

"Sure you are."

"No." Nyma looked up at her, and Val felt like she was staring at someone with several layers of pretense stripped away. Nyma's eyes didn't quite meet Val's. Her face kept scrunching up in preparation for tears she couldn't quite hold back. "You don't know me. You don't know what I've done. You don't know how easy it is for me to toss everyone else to the monsters to save my own ass."

Val rested her chin on her knees, pursing her lips. "You cut my hair."

Nyma gaped at her, flustered. "I-- _what?_ What does that matter?"

"It matters because you did it," Val said. She was having trouble putting it into words--the way Nyma's kindness had thawed something inside Val. The way a gentle touch could be so foreign and so familiar, the way one honest moment could tell you more about someone than all the false faces in the universe. "Bad people don't take care of strangers like that. I don't know if you've noticed, Nyma, but I'm a wreck. I'm a melodramatic, clingy mess who can't close her eyes without thinking about how outmatched we are, and you're the only thing that's been keeping me afloat. Fuck, Nyma, you're taking me halfway across the universe to find my cousin. How can you think you're a bad person?"

Agony flashed across Nyma's face, gone in an instant, and she drew herself up in her seat. "I'm taking you to Lance because if I do, then he can't say no when I ask him to help me get Rolo back."

The words tumbled out of her, and then she stared at Val as though expecting an explosion. And maybe it was the space beer, but Val couldn't see which part was the fuse that was supposed to ignite her temper.

"I should have thought of that," she said, glaring into the depths of her empty bottle. "Well, shit. Now I'm even more pissed we can't get ahold of them."

"Don't you get it?" Nyma asked, her voice rising sharply. "I was going to _trade_ you. I'm flying you across the _vrekking_ universe so I have a bargaining chip when I ask the paladins for help."

Val tipped her head to the side, considering this. It certainly sounded like the sort of thing a smuggler who'd just lost her friend and partner would do. A couple of days ago, Val probably would have accepted it for truth.

But she knew better now. Nyma was many things--harsh and opinionated and impatient and proud and selfish. She was also kind and loyal. She knew how to listen, and she knew when to help. Val didn't know her the way she knew her own family--there hadn't been time for that--but she'd seen enough to know that _pragmatic thief looking out for her own interests_ was just one small part of who Nyma was.

So Val smiled, enjoying the way it made Nyma wrinkle her nose in confusion. "I don't believe you."

Nyma blinked. "Why would I lie about this?"

"You wouldn't," Val said. "You're not lying, you're just wrong." She reached out and tapped Nyma on the nose. "You're a good person, and I'm glad I got to know you."

Nyma's breath hitched, her violet eyes going wide. They looked like geodes, those eyes. Beauty hidden inside a rock that looked unremarkable until it broke open. Beautiful not in spite of the rough exterior, but _because_ of it. Like Nyma.

It was only when a crimson blush spread across Nyma's face that Val realized she'd spoken aloud. She felt her own face grow hot, and she tried to figure out how to salvage a little bit of her dignity.

She shouldn't have worried about it, because the next thing she knew, Nyma’s lips were pressed against hers, warm and soft and hungry, and those soft, cool fingers were threading once again through Val’s short hair. Val shivered, sinking deeper into the kiss. The hunger for touch, for closeness, roared back to life inside her, and she cupped one hand around the back of Nyma’s neck as she tried to pull away.

_I'm tired of being alone._

Nyma didn't fight Val's silent plea. She started to retreat, and when Val didn't let her go, she immediately fell forward once more, closing the distance between them, wrapping Val up in her warmth, and Val soon lost herself in the moment.


	5. Gravity

Nyma woke slowly, her headache overshadowed by the painful crick in her neck. Groaning, she opened her eyes to the low lights of the _Harbinger’s_ cockpit. (Well, low except for the neon green glow of the core systems status indicators, which stabbed at her eyes like localized supernovae.)

The offending lights couldn’t hold her attention for long, however, and she turned, with no small amount of trepidation, to the warm, soft body pressed against hers.

Val’s head rested on Nyma’s shoulder, her hair tickling Nyma’s cheek. She had one hand wrapped around Nyma’s arm, which was draped around Val’s shoulder, while the other hung loose near an empty bottle that had spilled sticky residue across the floor. As Nyma tried to extricate herself, Val stirred, clutching Nyma’s arm tighter and nuzzling into her neck.

Nyma’s stomach swooped in a way that might have been more pleasant if it hadn’t brought a stirring of nausea with it.

Her hangover wasn’t bad, as hangovers went, but it was enough to convince her not to try moving just yet. As if she would have. (Not that there was any ulterior motive for her staying where she was. None whatsoever.)

Last night was a heady rush in Nyma’s memories—not the kind of rush that lent itself to convenient amnesia, but the kind that left her wondering how events had progressed so far so quickly. There had been an awful lot of talking about things Nyma had gotten way too good at ignoring, and there had been an awful lot of kissing that, while pleasant, raised an awful lot of questions Nyma wasn’t ready to deal with.

Then again, when _would_ she be ready? Anamuri could call at any moment with news of Voltron’s location, and then Val would be back with her cousin, and Nyma…

Nyma’s plan had been to convince the paladins to help her rescue Rolo (or, more likely, recover his body), and then she was gone. Out of their orbit. Out of the war. Alone, again.

That plan seemed like a much shittier one this morning, with the memory of Val’s hands on her hips fresh in her mind. The memory of Val straddling her lap, her fingers running over Nyma’s scalp and down the sensitive length of her tails. Val’s touch was feather-light and cool enough to send a chill down Nyma’s spine.

Did she really want to walk away from this? _Could_ she?

Nyma looked down at Val’s face. Asleep, she was softer than she let herself be in front of other people. Dark lashes fanned across her cheeks. Her lips were parted slightly, warm breath puffing past them to caress Nyma’s neck.

It wasn’t that Nyma was weak to pretty girls falling asleep on her shoulder, but there was no denying the tug she felt now, the irresistible call of gravity pulling her down, down, down to a place she'd sworn she'd never go again.

 _Vrekking zhet,_ Nyma thought, letting her head fall back against the wall. _This wasn’t part of the plan._

* * *

Nyma had always told herself she wasn’t a romantic. Love, she figured, was a luxury reserved for those lucky souls who weren’t scraping by at the greasy bottom of an empire older than memory. Love was a messy, delicate thing unsuited to the life of a smuggler or a rebel. Love was far too likely to blow up in her face, and Nyma was far too practical to give in to its siren song.

Oh, she’d had partners before—mostly women, always strangers, never men. People she met while searching for spare parts. Pretty faces in spaceport taverns. People who laughed at her dark sense of humor and didn’t mind that she was leaving in the morning.

Nyma had only two rules when it came to love. First, men were marks to trick, not prizes to chase. And two, she never got involved with someone she might have to watch die. Those two rules carried her through ten years of life in the criminal underworld, and never once had she broken them, though she had, once, bent rule number two.

There was never anything substantial between Nyma and Talla, the _Harbinger’s_ demolitions expert. Nothing either of them would admit to, anyway. There were weighted smiles, hidden blushes, a few more casual touches than Nyma allowed from anyone but Rolo.

But they were crewmates first, foremost, and finally. Whatever was brewing on the side couldn’t be allowed to matter.

Talla stuck around longer than most of the other crew members, though Nyma had never figured out if that was because of her or just because Talla had nowhere else to go. Few of them did. But resistance was a hard life, and not many people survived more than a few years of defiance. Those who did often retired before the Empire caught up with them.

Rolo didn’t have to draw these boundaries around himself. He established a close friendship with everyone to join the crew virtually the instant they stepped aboard—and, yes, that meant he mourned every time someone died, but it also meant he always had someone there to take comfort from. Nyma, who didn’t make friends easily, had no one but Rolo and Talla to comfort her if the unimaginable happened.

Maybe that was why she was so terrified of losing them.

On the other hand, for all Rolo’s uninhibited closeness with the others, he never lost his senses over a crush. It seemed to take no effort for him, either. Meanwhile there was Nyma, falling hard the very first time she let someone in.

She’d been in past her depth, no doubt about it, and so when Talla said she was thinking about leaving, Nyma had panicked. She hadn’t meant to ask Talla to stay, but she’d been hurt and confused and emotional, and Talla could hardly fail to notice when Nyma avoided her for three days straight. She’d tracked Nyma down, demanding to know what was wrong, and Nyma hadn’t been strong enough to hold back.

“Have you considered that maybe I don’t want you to go?”

Talla had looked surprised, which had only made it hurt worse. All the hugs. All the offhanded compliments emphasized by a sweet smile. All the shifts together in the cockpit, laughing over the dumbest things and enjoying each other’s company. And she thought Nyma could just let her walk away? “You could always come with me,” Talla said.

“I can’t leave Rolo,” Nyma said at once. “Or Beezer. They’re family as much as you, Talla.”

Even then, Nyma couldn’t quite bring herself to name the emotions hiding in plain sight.

Talla stayed, in the end. Just another year. Just until they had the money for all of them to get out of the game. That was what she said.

She died two months later when a sabotage mission went bad. The team was surrounded, and Talla, ever defiant, had detonated the charges early rather than be taken alive. Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, who had been on the _Harbinger_ waiting to extract the others, were the only ones who avoided the explosion.

Nyma still sometimes heard Talla’s final goodbye in her dreams. She still sometimes reminded herself that the blast had taken out the weapons depot they'd been targetting, and that Talla’s sacrifice, _everyone’s_ sacrifice, had saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

On her worst days, Nyma thought she could have traded those hundreds of thousands to get back what she had lost.

* * *

Nyma let Val sleep for nearly an hour before stiff muscles and raging emotions got the better of her. She carefully pried Val’s hand off her arm, then cast around her for something she could use as a pillow for Val in lieu of her shoulder.

Before she could find anything, however, Val stirred, arching her back and moaning as she lifted a hand to her forehead. Still leaning on Nyma’s shoulder, Val looked up, blue eyes smiling at her under drooping eyelids.

“You’re slacking,” Val murmured.

Nyma frowned. “What?”

“You were on...” Val trailed off, waving toward the dashboard. “You were on… on... Aw, hell. Come on, brain. _Estabas de servicio._ No, let me guess, you don’t speak Spanish. Ugh. Why is English _always_ the universal language?”

“Uh...” Nyma just stared at her, confused, until Val shot upright, snapping her fingers.

“You were on duty! Ha!” Val pumped a fist in the air, then grimaced and clutched her head. “Ow. I don’t suppose you aliens have magical hangover cures?”

Nyma stood, leaning against the wall until her headache subsided, then reached down to help Val up. “You might want to think twice about accusing people of shirking their responsibilities if you’re gonna beg hangover remedies off them. Just a tip.”

Val had one hand covering her face, but she lifted her fingers enough to squint at Nyma with one eye. “So you do have something?”

“No.”

Val groaned, and Nyma smiled to herself as she shuffled over to the pilot seat and ran through the standard checks. She wasn’t overly worried; the ship would have sounded an alarm if anything had gone wrong in the night. Actually, she was pretty sure she’d had that discussion with Val last night. They’d been contemplating heading to the crew quarters to have an actual bed, but Nyma had insisted that it was safer to be here, where they’d hear alarms. Setting the alerts to broadcast into the other room hadn’t occurred to her.

Well, her neck was paying for it now, and she rubbed it as she scrolled through the ship’s logs. After a few seconds, Val’s hands took over the massage, and Nyma tensed for a moment before forcing herself to relax.

“Val, listen.” Nyma kept her eyes on the screen, though there was zero chance of focusing as long as Val was touching her. “I’m sorry about last night. I crossed a line.”

The motion of Val’s fingers slowed. “Oh?”

“Yeah.” Nyma took a deep breath, trying to organize her thoughts. She had always been quicker with sarcasm and insults than with genuine emotion, but this was Val, and Val deserved more than a joke and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge what had happened. “I wasn’t thinking when I… kissed you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Val said, leaning more heavily on Nyma’s chair and letting her hands stray toward Nyma’s shoulders.

Nyma shivered, turning to meet Val’s gaze. “I mean it, Val. You’ve just been through a lot of shit. I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

“You’re not taking advantage of me,” Val said. “I wasn’t _that_ drunk.”

“It’s not about that.” Nyma sighed, forcing herself to breath before she started shouting in earnest. “Look.” She closed her eyes, the faces of dead friends swimming at the edges of her vision. “I don’t know about you, Val, but I’ve never been good with relationships, and I’m pretty damn messed up right now.”

After a moment’s pause, Val came around the side of Nyma’s chair, sat on the arm of the nearby copilot chair, and tilted her head to the side. “If you don’t want this, Nyma, I’m not going to force it on you.”

“That’s the _problem_ ,” Nyma said. “I do want it. I need something to hold onto right now, and that’s not fair to you.”

“It is if I’m holding on to you just as tight.”

Emotion condensed in the back of Nyma’s throat, making it hard to speak. “Val...”

Val leaned forward to lay her hand over Nyma’s. “We’ll take it slow,” she said. “Take time to get to know each other. Take time to recover from… everything.” She paused, worrying her lip. “I know something happened between you and Lance and you got off on the wrong foot, but… do you think you might stay with us once we find Voltron? I could talk to him for you. See if we can smooth things out."

“I’ll… try,” Nyma said, staring at Val’s hand.

“Okay.” Val stood up, stepping closer to Nyma, and pressed a kiss to her lips. It wasn’t the deep, lingering kisses of last night, but it was soft and sweet, and it left Nyma breathless. Val stepped back too soon, her smile making Nyma dizzy. “Then we have time to figure it out.”

She turned with a flourish, threw herself into the copilot seat, and called up the scanners.

“Awaiting your orders, captain.”

Nyma laughed, not least of all at the absurdity of anyone calling _her_ captain, but had Val set a course for another arbitrary patch of space. They didn’t have anywhere in particular to go until Anamuri contacted them, but Nyma had always felt safer when she was going somewhere.

She supposed it only made sense that the same was true of relationships, too.

* * *

The next two days passed uneventfully. Val and Nyma took shifts in the cockpit, sleeping in the crew quarters when they were off and going down to the hold to check on the refugees when they had nothing else to do. Val was more keen than ever to learn how to fly the ship, and Nyma was only too happy to teach her.

When Nyma wasn’t giving Val lessons, they just talked—about Earth, about the paladins, about Rolo and Beezer. About Talla, as much as Nyma could bring herself to talk about her.

On the fourth day out from Vanda’s prison ship, Val borrowed the electric razor Layeni had found in the mountains of loot and supplies. The others who had been prisoners long enough for their hair to be matted beyond hope had been using it to shave their heads, and Val asked Nyma to get rid of the rest of her damaged hair: much of what grew from the base of her skull and a large swath above her right ear. Nyma was sad to see it go, but the end result—something Val called an undercut—had a certain sharp-edged beauty to it.

In any case, Val seemed more settled for the haircut, and that alone made it worthwhile.

The next day, after Val had taken her turn to sleep, she turned up in the cockpit dressed in one of Nyma’s outfits—loose-fitting pants that were just a bit too long for Val’s legs and a navy blue crop-top with long sleeves. There was something thrilling about seeing Val like that. Not just the warm, light brown skin it showed, but the comfortable familiarity of it. The idea that Nyma _had_ someone who might show up in her clothes, her wavy hair still wispy from sleep.

And Val’s sleepy grin said she knew exactly what sort of effect she was having on Nyma. She leaned down to kiss Nyma’s cheek while Nyma was still too flustered to respond, then took her place at the controls.

“So what’s on the schedule for today?”

Struggling to regain her composure, Nyma flipped on the autopilot. “Same old same old,” she said. “A lot of waiting, a lot of staring at the stars.”

“I like the stars,” Val protested, a hint of a whine entering her voice.

Nyma laughed. “You’ll get tired of them soon enough,” she said. “Once you’ve been out here with them for long enough, they don’t seem as bright as they used to.”

Val hummed, clearly skeptical. “If you say so.”

Rather than answer, Nyma just let herself look. For the first time in a long while, she let herself _look_. When she was younger, she’d dreamed of being out here, flying her own ship, free to go wherever she wanted to be. Maybe things hadn’t turned out the way she’d imagined. Maybe it wasn’t all happy endings and quick money, but it wasn’t all bad, either.

She glanced to the side, to where Val sat sprawled across her chair, her legs hooked over one arm. Part of Nyma still said she should fight this, should avoid emotional entanglements that could only end with her hurt, but Nyma was already already past the event horizon and falling into the unknown.

Then again, Nyma was okay with falling. It was better than standing still.


End file.
